Category Archives: Fake News

Twitter is testing three new warning labels that are designed to try and prevent the spread of misinformation. Tweets will include labels including "Get the latest," "Stay informed," and "Misleading" depending on their content.

The new labels were discovered by researcher Jane Munchun Wong with screenshots of all three shared for all to see. Wong had to tweet something that would trigger all three warnings, hence the rather odd content.

Since that tweet went live, Twitter Head of Site Integrity Yoel Roth has confirmed the labels' existence, saying that they're "early experiments" while inviting feedback on their current setup.

Twitter, like other social networks, has come under fire for the ease with which misinformation can spread. These labels are one way that such a problem could be dealt with, at least in part. There's no indication if or when these labels will be made available to all or whether they'll be limited to the official Twitter apps. Whether you're using Twitter or Tweetbot, knowing what information is real and what isn't is vital.

No matter which app you're using, shouldn't you be using it on the best iPhone around? We think so!

Excerpt from:

Twitter is testing new warning labels to prevent the spread of fake news - iMore

Twitter is in the news this week in India for putting a manipulated media tag on posts by leaders from the Bharatiya Janata Party, containing propaganda that fact-checkers found to include misinformation. While the Indian government has turned this into a fight for narrative against the social media network, the development is also a powerful reminder that misinformation and efforts to address it will be closely watched.

Sumitra Badrinathan is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oxfords Reuters Institute, who received a PhD in political science this year from the University of Pennsylvania. Badrinathans work focuses on misinformation and comparative politics, with a focus on India.

In a recent paper based on an experiment in Bihar during the 2019 elections, for example, Badrinathan found that even an hour-long module aimed at improving peoples ability to identify fake news did not necessarily make them any better at it. Even more significantly, the results found that those who identified as supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party seemed to become worse at identifying fake news after the training module potentially because of a backfire effect in which people tend to hold firmer to their beliefs after being corrected.

I spoke to Badrinathan about the Bihar experiment, what it might tell us about political identities in India, and what further research she would like to see on misinformation.

Tell me a little bit about your academic background.I just finished a PhD in political science at the University of Pennsylvania. And Im about to start a postdoc research position at Oxford. Before my PhD I was born and brought up in Bombay, I grew up there before moving to the US.

Id always been interested in politics, but it was when I moved here to study that it became clear to me that politics could also be about research and good-grounded science. So thats what I have focused on.

How did you come to work on disinformation?First, let me say that, when the 2014 elections were going on, I was in my final year of college, and elections were happening around me for the first time in a way that I was actually able to appreciate them.

As part of that, I worked on a campaign and we went door to door to talk to people trying to get them to go out to vote. It struck me at the time that we knew very little about why a particular person casts their vote in a certain way, at least in terms of systematic data.

So I went back to the folks I was working with and said, is this tabulated? Are we knocking on doors randomly? Or do we have an idea of why were doing this because it seems like people vote for candidates not only because they like them, but because of a whole host of other reasons that might have little to do with a candidates personality or policy ideas.

It became clear to me that that sort of systematic data about these things in India was not easy to come by. Now, it is a lot easier than it was back then. But thats what got me into data and politics.

When I started my PhD, I was still interested in data science and how it could apply to politics. I was taking classes on doing experiments on big data, on advanced statistics, and so on. But I didnt exactly know what I was going to focus on at that time.

This is about 2016-2017. Misinformation was a big deal in the US because [former US President Donald] Trump had just gotten elected. At the time, more and more people in India were getting access to the internet, I was on all of these WhatsApp groups with friends, the extended family and so forth.

I started to see similar patterns in India. In that, when there was a big election or event in the country, there would be a deluge of fake news on my phone. In the US, academic researchers were trying to see whether they could talk to people about this as an issue, and whether that would turn them around. Tech companies like Facebook and Twitter got involved. They started piloting initiatives like putting a disputed tag on a message to see if it had an impact.

There was nothing like that in India. For me, a light struck in my head. It became clear that I had the tools to conduct something like this, and it matters to me, because Ive seen people around me succumb to false information and propaganda.

Putting two and two together, thats where I started, and Ive stuck on that path.

Do you think, in the Western context, we have a good handle on this research area now?Yes, and I can give you examples.

For one, we know that one of the largest vulnerabilities to misinformation in the West is whom you voted for. The way that affects how you come across this information is through a mechanism called motivated reasoning, which in simple words, is to say that humans are motivated to reason in certain ways. And that reasoning, more often that not, coincides with your partisan identity.

You voted for somebody. You will feel cognitive dissonance in your mind if you shy away from trying to support the position that you already took. So we are prone to biases like confirmation bias and disconfirmation bias. And we dont want to do anything that goes against these pre-existing views, because it causes dissonance in our heads.

That concept has been shown time and again, in a variety of contexts, to affect misinformation consumption in such a strong way that not only has it reduced the effect of corrections if somebody is correcting information that is beneficial to my partys cause, Im more likely to not have that correction have an impact on me but in some cases, it also led to a backfire effect.

Which is that previously I might have believed or not believed a piece of information beneficial to my party. But once you correct it, and if youre somebody I dont like, then I double down in such a way that it doesnt matter what I thought before. I am going to say this is definitely true and not going to listen to your correction.

This is just one example. I dont think we have a clear understanding of the drivers of misinformation and the mechanisms to believe them in the Indian context. That is what a bunch of colleagues and I are working towards understanding.

How much does this veer out of political science into interdisciplinary work?A lot of the literature that I cite comes from psychology and cognitive sciences, because we are talking about ultimately how the human mind confirms and believes things. And in general, more than political science. Its political communication. Thats my minor in my PhD also.

Youve said there isnt much work on India, but is there research on other non-Western spaces?Very little. In general, its limited to contexts we would characterise as developed, and where they use more public platforms like Facebook and Twitter. So naturally, the solutions that we come up with will be tailored to those platforms, which is why I keep talking about how its hard to imagine those solutions applying to not just India, but a large majority of the world, that is using WhatsApp or other private applications like Signal or Telegram.

Tell me about the misinformation experiment in Bihar.The 2019 elections were coming up, and I wanted to do something around that, because we know misinformation would start to rise. So it seemed to be a good opportunity to go into the field. But I wasnt sure what I would actually do.

One of the things that had been tried [elsewhere] was telling people beforehand that misinformation was out there and reminding them that they should try to analyse information with the goal of accuracy. And that has led people towards better information processing in the past.

I liked that idea. Before running a study, I talked to a bunch of people knocking on doors, focus groups and found out that a lot of people, especially older folks, were getting on the internet for the first time. People whose families had saved up to buy mobile phones and they had one per household.

And this led to a series of observations that werent in my mind before I went to the field, which is that people because theyre new to the internet werent aware of the concept of misinformation to begin with.

That might seem like a bad thing, but for the study, it was like talking about a blank slate. This is an opportunity to teach people that there is news out there that is not entirely true. And maybe we can teach people to become more careful news consumers.

So that was the premise of the study. We selected a set of households. For each household, we had an enumerator go and talk to, sometimes for close to an hour, about misinformation. For some, the idea itself was a surprise because they said things like, its on my phone, it must be true, because the phone was to them an elite authority source.

So we talked to them about sources, saying you can trust some and distrust others. We talked to people about some fake stories that had gone viral at the time. We printed out four of these stories the original image, and then a small bubble next to it explaining what was wrong.

And the enumerators explained to people that these are just four examples, but we want to show you how the things you come across on the phone may or may not be true. We talked to people about ways they can go about countering these stories, like reverse image searches, or going to fact checking websites. And we left behind a flyer with tips to spot misinformation.

And then people voted in the general election. After that, we went back to the same households to measure whether what we did worked or not.

I dont want to get too technical, but the experiment part was that only some households randomly chosen were talked to about misinformation, some were not. The key thing were interested in finding out is the difference between the houses that were given the treatment and the ones that were not.

Now obviously, we dont know how people voted, but the premise was if misinformation can affect your opinion, that affects your voting behaviour. So we went back after the elections, after voting but before results had been announced, because we didnt want results to affect the way people answered our final questions.

So we went back and measured through a series of questions whether people got better at identifying fake news.

And the results were somewhat surprising to you?I dont know if they were surprising as much as I would be lying if I said they werent disappointing. Obviously you want something to work.

In the literature which Im talking about, people havent done this thing where someone goes and talks to respondents about misinformation, with an up-to-one-hour-long module that combined a bunch of different things that I would call more pedagogical or learning focused. It hasnt been done.

All of the solutions have involved one-line nudges or push notifications, that sort of thing. This was a much more evolved intervention. Just on that basis, I expected it to work.

But second, there are normative implications. If misinformation is such a big problem for peoples opinions, and theyre casting votes on the basis of it, for the health of democracy, you want something like this to work.

Which is why it was disappointing to find that in general, the whole intervention did not work. The difference between the treatment group and the control group was zero. The group that did not get any of the training was not worse at identifying misinformation to the group that did.

There was also a more surprising part. I broke up the sample of respondents into people based on their party or whom they said they liked, which in practice meant people who liked or preferred the BJP or BJP allies at the Centre, and those who said anything else.

Remember the backfire effect, which is when peoples affinities towards their party is so strong that they double down on something that youre telling them is false. That happened here.

Respondents who said they supported the BJP, when they got the training, they became worse at identifying misinformation. They were better before. They significantly decreased their ability to identify misinformation when they got the training.

For people who said they did not support the BJP, they were not very good beforehand meaning in the control group but after the training they were able to improve their information processing.

Essentially, the treatment worked in opposite ways for both of the subgroups, which I had not expected at all. When we talk about parties in India, nothing in the literature says that we should expect party identities to be so strong and consolidated to the point where they affect peoples attitudes and behaviours. Thats not to say that people arent sure who they are voting for. Thats to say that voting may or may not happen on the basis of ideology and identity. People vote for a host of different reasons.

This is what the literature on India in comparative politics has shown. So to find that your identity in terms of who you support politically, as opposed to other identities like religion, caste, and so on, can be so strong that it can condition your responses on a survey, that too only for one set of partisans, thats something that hadnt been found before.

My understanding of the backfire effect is that the research in the US has been muddled it exists in some contexts, but not in others.Thats right. The backfire effect is one of those things weve gone a bit back and forth about. Im using that term in the Indian context because of a lack of a better word. And by this we shouldnt conclude that such an effect definitely exists.

This is the first, and to my knowledge, only field study that has been conducted on this, and we need so many more to understand if this sort of effect is replicated. One of the things that may push us towards thinking that it wont be replicated is that this was conducted during a very contentious election. And we know from previous research, not in India but in other contexts, that peoples identities are stronger during elections and other contentious periods because it is salient.

Everyone around you is talking about BJP, not BJP, people are knocking on your doors asking for votes. Its likely that the salience of that identity pushed people to behave a certain way, and that if you take away the context of a contentious election, it wouldnt have happened.

We dont know whether this is limited to just this particular sample for this particular time. And it is very possible that it is. Whoever is going to read your newsletter, if people are interested in misinformation in India, we need several more people working on this to be able to say that what we know is true for sure and not limited to the context of one study.

One of the other interesting things about the paper is that, before the intervention, it seemed that those who said they supported the BJP were better than others at discerning fake news?Yes, and thats a puzzle. There are a couple of different reasons for this anecdotally. One reason is that, anecdotally, the BJP has a supply-side advantage. When it comes to misinformation, most of the political misinformation out there almost always has the BJP name on it. Either the misinformation is favouring the BJP, or countering it.

But in my experience, the BJP is always referenced. And this is plausible because they have a supply-side advantage. We have heard about them having a war room of people to create stories.

Its possible that respondents who support the BJP are aware that they have a supply-side advantage, and in the absence of treatment, this makes them better off in a survey setting at identifying true or false stories. Thats an anecdotal explanation. That non-BJP participants may or may not be aware of misinformation to the extent that BJP participants are, just because it doesnt favour them.

The second explanation is, if you look at where this better information processing for BJP respondents is coming from this is a smaller sample, since its just the control group you see that the overall better rate of identification comes from their ability to identify pro-BJP stories as true.

Even in the absence of treatment, theyre doing what we would expect any strong partisan to do. For non-BJP supporters, this alignment is not there in this sample. I dont know if thats super convincing, its not to me, but its the extent to which I can go with this data.

For the lay reader, how would you summarise the results of the non-BJP respondents?They were worse off beforehand, but they were able to improve their information processing skills from the treatment.

But one thing I want to say is that the two sides are also very different. One side supports a party. One side is made of people who support a bunch of different parties, but the only thing they have in common is that they dont support a party. Even ex-ante, the sides arent equal. And thats not easy to solve, because of the nature of misinformation in India, which is either pro-BJP or not.

In Bihar, at the time, if you thought of trying to find misinformation that was pro-RJD or pro-JDU, and I scoured the internet for stories like this, there werent any. So by design it had to be like this. And that has created a little bit of an imbalance between the two groups.

We shouldnt expect them to behave the same way because one group is not bound by a common shared cause, the way that the BJP sample is, and I guess thats saying something about Indian politics in general these days.

You also find that those who are more digitally literate did not necessarily discern fake news better.Yes, and thats a tricky one to answer. I created a measure from scratch, because everything that exists to measure digital literacy is focused on the Western context. Mine measured familiarity with WhatsApp. You can think of digital literacy in a bunch of different ways. You can think of it in terms of how someone navigates their phone, which is very difficult to measure because you have to observe people doing it. Maybe if I had gone down that road, answers would be different.

I measured by a series of questions that indicated how familiar someone was with doing different things on WhatsApp how to create a list of people to broadcast a message to, how to mute groups and so on. And the responses were self-reported.

What we find in the Western context is those who are less digitally literate tend to be older people and they are worse at identifying misinformation. In this Bihar context, those who are better at digital literacy are not necessarily worse at identifying misinformation.

One of the reasons for that is, in order to pass along misinformation, you have to have a certain amount of digital literacy to be able to do that. It is plausible that what is being measured in this context is a measure of digital familiarity that correlates with your ability to push messages forward, which may correlate with your ability to push misinformation forward, if youre so inclined.

I dont know that for sure, but thats what might be going on in this context.

So the results seem to suggest that partisan identities, or at least the pro-BJP identity, is stronger than we think. Let me bring in your other paper with Simon Chauchard titled I dont think thats true, bro, which seemed to suggest something slightly different.

The result of that is pretty much the opposite of this. So [the Bihar paper] was a field experiment, or a training experiment. You could think of it as a fact-checking or correction treatment.

This paper was very different. It was purely a correction experiment. The result was also very different.

In the field study, I found that on average, there was no difference between the treatment and the control groups. In this other study, which is an online one, we find that a very subtle treatment is able to move beliefs or that people can get very easily corrected.

But there were a lot of differences in the studies, so its hard to imagine that we should expect the results should be the same.

For one, the second study was entirely online. That meant they were not just regular internet users, but those so experienced with the internet that they are signing up for online panels to take surveys. So a very different sample.

We gave people these hypothetical WhatsApp screenshots, in which two people are having a conversation with each other on a group chat. Theyre talking to each other about something and somebody drops a piece of misinformation, and a second user counters them.

Now they can either choose to counter them or not counter them. And if they do counter them, they can choose to counter them with some evidence or without evidence. In essence, the treatment is that one-line counter message, which acts as the correction. And we tried to play with a bunch of different messages to do this. In some cases it involved a user just simply refuting the message with no proof.

The user would say something like, I dont think thats true, bro, which is where the title of the paper came from. And in some cases, they would refute the message with a tone of information and references.

Its an open question: Does this sort of correction work? Because, as we said before, WhatsApp cant correct messages because of their encrypted nature. So users have to correct each other. And not all of India is a setting where people are new to the internet.

We tried to see whether peer or social corrections can have an effect. And then there was the question of what kinds of corrections work.

In short, we found that any correction works to reduce peoples beliefs in misinformation, and have them process information correction. Anything. So the correction that says, I dont think thats true bro works. The correction that says I dont think this is true, but here is a paragraph on why its not true, works equally well.

I think that was surprising to us. Similar correction experiments have been shown to work in the American context. But what was surprising to us was the type correction didnt seem to matter. Even the short messages without any source worked just as well, relative to the longer messages backed by some evidence.

Now this seemed to suggest that there wasnt such a strong partisan identity or motivated reasoning.Yes. Its not to say they didnt have partisan identities. Everyone has identities. Its to say that the context youre in can bring those identities to the forefront, can make them salient.

In this online experiment, its not a time when people are coming to your door to campaign. Elections themselves make partisanship and political identities salient. In this case, youre going online to make some extra money. Youre not thinking about party politics.

The context is very different. Theres some evidence of this in the American context. Theres a recent paper that shows that its the context that makes identity salient. So in the context of an election, where youre already pitting one party against another, you are naturally motivated to think in such a way that will help or hurt your partys cause.

When you think of the online experience, that happened after the elections, this competition or win-loss framework was not in peoples heads. Thats not to say they didnt have partisan identities, just that the context of what was happening in the world at the time didnt activate these identities.

What other research have you been doing on this front?Im working on a bunch of different things. But one thats interesting me at the moment is a paper my co-author Simon Chauchard and I are working on, which is trying to understand the mechanisms of belief in WhatsApp groups. Why do people believe certain misinformation over others? And what motivates them to correct this misinformation.

One of the things were testing is that WhatsApp groups are common built around common cause society groups, parent-teacher associations, sometimes political groups. More often than not, theyre built with a certain cause and come to assume a certain identity.

Our working theory is that because they come to assume this identity, the members of the group are motivated to more often than not agree with each other. Theres this consensus towards a shared group identity that pushes people towards agreeing, which is why a lot fo misinformation may just get lost or go uncorrected.

But that also means, when somebody does correct something, it can very easily change something because the seed has been sown. That gives other people the opportunity to say, oh yeah, youre right, I dont think this is actually true.

I have a lot of anecdotal evidence to show that this might be one of the mechanisms at play. I talked to a woman in Mumbai who, during Covid, had this piece of information that said vegetarians are immune to the Coronavirus, so eat more vegetarian food.

She forwarded that message to all of her groups. I asked her whether she thought it was true. She said, Im not really sure, but at that point it was 9 am, and I had to send a good morning message. So I sent this.

Which goes to show that in some contexts in India, just because of the nature of our WhatsApp groups and the pressure on people to wake up in the morning and forward something can end up being misinformation, just because of the shared identity or norms of a group.

Were testing whether breaking those norms in some way is the mechanism to lead other members to fall in line. Were testing whether it is shared group identity, not actually belief in the message, but a need to be accepted by the group, as opposed to actually believing the message, which of those is the better mechanism to explain what is going on. Were doing this in the context of Covid misinformation, so look out for that working paper.

Are there others doing interesting work on this front?We have talked about corrections. But theres a second strand of research, not do with correction, but with quantifying the amount thats out there and maybe providing technical or AI-based solutions.

One lab doing really good work is that of Kiran Garimella at MIT. He and his lab are doing some fantastic work on trying to quantify how much misinformation is out there on WhatsApp in India and trying to see what we can do about it.

WhatsApp started public groups recently, where you can go to a link online and join, which takes away some of the privacy. Kiran and his co-authors have been scraping WhatsApp messages in these groups to give us an idea of how much is misinformation, how much comes from one party source versus another, how much is hateful speech, how much encourages Hindu-Muslim polarisation.

Some of his work is really excellent, so thats one person I definitely want to flag in this field whos doing great work.

Whats one misconception you find yourself having to correct all the time, whether from fellow scholars, journalists, lay people?Its funny, theres this meme template floating around on Twitter, called types of academic papers, where people are coming up with common tropes in the field.

One misconception is that people, non academics, have strong opinions on fact-checking. Either fact-checking is awesome, or it doesnt work at all. But the truth is we dont know. We need to run systematic scientific studies to see if that sort of things work, because were interested in understand whether the treatment works.

You cant push a fact-check out there, watch one or two people change their beliefs and conclude that it works. Whether fact checking works is a function of whos doing, in what context its being done, what kinds of fact checks are being done, what the intensity of those fact checks are there are so many sub questions.

Thats not to say that fact checking is not good. We need all of the normative things that we have to fight this problem. But apart from journalists and NGOs working on it, we need more academics to do systematic studies to show under what conditions these kind of interventions can be most effective.

We need more researchers working on this, so we can do more work, and then write about them in more public outlets such as yours. We know the only way to effectively measure intervention, just like a vaccine trial, is to see the difference between those who got the dose and those who didnt.

That knowledge is not there, because there arent enough of us working on it. And the deluge of misinformation, compared to what were doing to counter is theres just such a vast difference, that sometimes it seems that whatever we dont wont be enough.

But thats just to say that if we had 100 people working on it, as opposed to just 10 or 20, that would help.

Here is the original post:

Interview: Sumitra Badrinathan on tackling fake news and the effects of BJPs supply advantage - Scroll.in

The United States topped a list of the countries most frequently targeted by deceptive foreign influence operations using Facebook between 2017 and 2020, the social media company said in a new report released on Wednesday.

It also came second on a list of countries targeted by domestic influence operations in that same time period. Facebook Inc said one of the top sources of coordinated inauthentic behavior networks targeting the United States in the year leading up to the 2020 presidential election was domestic campaigns originating in the United States itself, as well as foreign operations from Russia and Iran.

The tallies were based on the number of coordinated inauthentic behavior networks removed by Facebook, a term it uses for a type of influence operations that relies on fake accounts to mislead users and manipulate the public debate for strategic ends.

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Facebook began cracking down on these influence operations after 2016, when U.S. intelligence concluded that Russia used the platform as part of a cyber-influence campaign that aimed to help former President Donald Trump win the White House, a claim Moscow has denied.

The company said Russia, followed by Iran, topped the list for sources of coordinated inauthentic behavior and that this was mostly rooted in foreign interference. Top targets of foreign operations included Ukraine, the United Kingdom, Libya and Sudan.

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But the company also said that about half of the influence operations it has removed since 2017 around the world were conducted by domestic, not foreign, networks.

IO [influence operations] really started out as an elite sport. We had a small group of nation states in particular that were using these techniques. But more and more were seeing more people getting into the game, Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebooks head of security policy, told reporters on a conference call.

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Facebook said the domestic influence operations that targeted the United States were operated by conspiratorial or fringe political actors, PR or consulting firms and media websites.

Myanmar was the country targeted by the most domestic inauthentic networks, according to Facebooks count, though these networks were relatively small in size.

Gleicher said threat actors had pivoted from large, high-volume campaigns to smaller and more targeted ones, and that the platform was also seeing a rise in commercial influence operations.

I actually think the majority of what were seeing here, these arent actors that are motivated by politics. In terms of volume, a lot of this is actors that are motivated by money, he said. Theyre scammers, theyre fraudsters, theyre PR or marketing firms that are looking to make a business around deception.

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Facebook investigators also said they expected it would get harder to discern what was part of a deceptive influence campaign as threat actors increasingly use witting and unwitting people to blur the lines between authentic domestic discourse and manipulation.

The report included more than 150 coordinated inauthentic networks identified and removed by Facebook since 2017.

Read the original here:

Facebook and fake news: U.S. tops list of targets of foreign influence operations - Global News

Wow: It now looks like Jeff Bezos and his damage-control team just made up not one but two whole stories to deflect coverage of his affair with a then-married woman: one, a claim that the Saudis had hacked his phone to get telling texts and revealing photos; two, charges that the National Enquirer tried to blackmail him into halting his investigation into how the shots had leaked.

Eventually, the world learned that the guy who sold the info to the Enquirer was Bezos girlfriends brother, a Hollywood press agent no hacking required and nothing to make the Enquirer fear any investigation.

Brad Stones new book, Amazon Unbound, excerpted for Bloomberg News, details how a consulting firm helped the Amazon CEO assemble his false counterstory, which relied on the suggestion that hed been targeted because his Washington Post was so critical of both the Saudi regime and then-President Donald Trump and allowed him to reveal the affair himself while pretending he was being heroic by refusing to be blackmailed.

Pretty masterful while it lasted . . . except that the owner of The Washington Post (Democracy dies in darkness is its self-righteous Bezos-era motto) now stands exposed as a cynical purveyor of fake news who even tried to frame a media outlet to protect his own image.

The rest is here:

Jeff Bezos exposed as the king of fake news - New York Post

Was this the smoking gun? Chinese military scientists discussed weaponising SARS coronaviruses was the headline of a report in The Australian, which flashed on my WhatsApp one morning this week. Before noon, Id received the report from half a dozen people with the familiar prescription: Must read!

The report said it had unearthed a leaked document written by Chinese military scientists speaking of weaponising coronaviruses, confirming what has for long been suspected by conspiracy theorists ever since the pandemic began in Wuhan, China.

But there was a small catch. The secret document cited in the report was from a not-so-secret book published in China in 2015, which is still available in Chinese bookstores. It also turned out that the authors, including Xu Dezhong, formerly a professor at the Air Force Medical University, were speaking of the first SARS epidemic being weaponised not by China, but by foreign powers unleashing a virus on the Chinese population. Not that these two details made much of a difference as the story continued to go, well, viral.

The belated publicity was not entirely bad news for Mr. Xu. On one online Chinese bookstore, Dangdang, there was a 10-fold increase in the price of the book, observed Pan Chengxin, a professor at Deakin University in Australia. The book, by most accounts, wasnt taken very seriously in China perhaps until this week.

Shortly before The Australian report, another article on the origins of COVID-19 evoked discussion. A 10,000-word essay by Nicholas Wade, previously a science reporter for The New York Times, made a strong case for why a laboratory accident couldnt be ruled out, citing, among other things, the outbreak beginning in Wuhan, home to the premier Chinese lab studying coronaviruses; the absence of a natural bat population there; and the inability to find an intermediate animal host, as was found after the first SARS epidemic, establishing its natural origins. Mr. Wade went a step further, suggesting there were scientific reasons to suggest this virus was not natural. That claim was, however, rebutted by many virologists including Kristian Andersen, who pointed out that his argument of an unusual furin cleavage site being a smoking gun was the only specific argument put forward to support a lab leak and was false.

If you are confused at this point, you are not alone. For news reporters trying to separate fact from fiction, furin cleavage sites and codons might as well be Latin or Greek.

What Mr. Wade did, however, get right is his conclusion that there is no clear evidence either to support or rule out whether the virus came from nature or a lab. Indeed, a lab accident and natural origins are not mutually exclusive possibilities, considering we may never know if the natural source was in a cave or in a cage.

Further muddying the search for origins is the politics. If the Trump administration in the U.S. prematurely wanted to claim the virus was lab-made despite thin evidence, China has spread its own conspiracy theories, with one Foreign Ministry spokesperson claiming that the virus was brought by the U.S. army to Wuhan. China has also been far from forthcoming, delaying access to Wuhan and not providing a WHO team with raw data. And forget about foreign researchers ever getting unrestricted access to the insides of Wuhans labs, all of which will only lead to more doubts.

Ultimately, only science, free from politics, can give us a clear answer. But good science takes time, which is in short supply in an age where we demand immediate answers.

Link:

Fact and fiction in a fake news epidemic - The Hindu

Issued on: 11/05/2021 - 16:01

Disinformation online has led to a sluggish vaccine roll-out in Ivory Coast. Ivorian and international health authorities have told FRANCE 24 that they are concerned about the pandemic of fake news. While this problem is not unique to Ivory Coast, the West African state is lagging behind a number of other countries in the region when it comes to vaccination rates.

When you get vaccinated, you become sick, said Anderson Dago, an unemployed 25-year-old standing in a potholed street in Abidjans Yopougon neighborhood. I read on social media that people who are vaccinated get controlled by 5G."His view is typical of people living in the area.

I dont believe Covid-19 exists, said Camara Djaka Sissoko who runs a small boutique. White people cannot even handle a bit of malaria. We are tougher. We can resist Covid-19.

Ivory Coast is facing a pandemic of disinformation. The country has received 504,000 doses of the Astrazeneca vaccine under the Covax scheme an initiative coordinated by the World Health Organization and others, to ensure that less developed countries have access to Covid-19 vaccines.They arrived in Ivory Coast in late February and will expire in September. So far, just over half the vaccines (252,317)have been used. Ivory Coast also has 50,000 vaccines donated by the Indian embassy, which currently lie dormant in a refrigerator these will expire in October. The roll-out here has been slower than in neighbouring countries such as Ghana.

'There is so much fake news'

At the INHP vaccination center in Yopougon, Estelle Yapi cuts a lonely figure.The 47-year-old social worker, retrained as a nurse to help deliver jabs during this crisis, sits under a white tarpaulin as the afternoon sun beats down. Rows of chairs, set up for those waiting to receive inoculation, sit empty.

It is normally busier in the morning, she concedes.

Yapi estimates that at full capacity, this centre could deliver 200-300 doses a day.While demand has been picking up, on one day in March,soon after the vaccination programme had begun, just 14 shots were delivered.

The centres logistic director offered a direct explanation. People inform themselves online. There is so much fake news, said Jean-Baptists Yat Ell.

In April 2020, residents of the area destroyed a Covid-19 testing centre that was being built close by.The protesters were at least in part triggered by a Facebook post from a pro-opposition cyberactivist, known online as Serge Koffi Le Drne, who suggested that the site would be used to house sick Covid-19 patients and was a government conspiracy to kill people in the area.

Yat said the link is clear.There was a communications problem. There was disinformation that made people revolt, he said.

A wave of scepticism

Astudyreleased by the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in March surveyed 15 African countries, including Ivory Coast, interviewing close to 16,000 people. It noted that online channels, particularly on social media, tend to be the most trusted source of information among vaccine-sceptic groups.

>> Suspicion mars Ivory Coast's vaccine drive

In fact, 54 per cent of Ivorians surveyed said they had seen disinformation online more than the 41 percent average across the 15 countries. Two-in-three Ivorians believe that the threat of coronavirus is exaggerated; two-in-five believe that Covid-19 is a planned event by foreign actors; and 38 percent believe that Africans are being used as guinea pigs in vaccine trials, according to the study.

Dr Richard Mihigo, coordinator of immunisation and vaccine development for the WHOs Africa arm said that disinformation was higher in countries where there is higher penetration of internet usage.

This is not a phenomenon that is only a problem for Africa. Unfortunately, with Covid-19, weve seen a global scepticism around vaccination for Covid-19 in general, he said.

When you put that in our contexts when we didnt go through the first waves in a severe situation like was witnessed in the West, people started to think about why they [governments and international health authorities] are insisting so much on something which is not really a problem for us.

'We dont give a damn about Corona!'

In 2020, a number of high-profile incidents saw the Ivorian authorities receive backlash online for alleged hypocrisy over Covid-19 policy.

In March that year a number of public figures close to the government were exempted from a stay in a quarantine centre after a personal intervention from the Prime Minister. The banning of public protests in the run up to the presidential election, under the Covid-19-induced state of emergency, was seen as political manipulation of the crisis. This sentiment deepened in August when a clip of President Alassane Ouattara went viral where he was seen saying We dont give a damn about Corona! during his swearing-in as the candidate for the ruling RHDP party.

The influence of French media should also not be understated according to Professor Daniel Ekra, head of the countrys vaccination programme.

This vaccination campaign was preceded by lots of rumours and disinformation.In Africa and especially in Ivory Coast, this was triggered in April or May [2020] by someone during a TV debate in France saying that we should test the vaccine in Africa, he said, referring to thisincident.

In Ivory Coast, the government is scrambling to boost interest in vaccination with social media campaigns and Facebook Live events. Patrick Achi, the current PM, was the first person to get vaccinated in the country in an event covered by the media. But it may be some time before the tide of fake news can be turned.

People make up their own minds. It is a question of communication, said Ekra.

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Covid-19: How fake news is hampering Ivory Coasts vaccination efforts - FRANCE 24 English

Al-Rawi started his academic journey after first working in media as a communications officer and radio correspondent. He was driven to research by curiosity and the desire to explore controversial issues such as fake news discourses in social media or how bots influence or interfere with elections. He sees research as a foundation from which to engage the wider public on new ideas. He shares his research publicly to inform the public and encourage them to think and reflect yet not to get them to think in a particular way.

This goal aligns well with his primary knowledge mobilization strategy, media engagement. As an academic engaging with the media, Al-Rawi relies on both his previous experience which has taught him to cultivate relationships with members of the media, respond quickly to requests, prepare key points prior to interviews and avoid responding to trolls.

He is also learning as he goes on how best to share research findings through this channel. Currently he is exploring if peer review publication prior to media engagement provides a more solid basis from which to engage a public audience.

Al-Rawi shared that the benefits of doing knowledge mobilization is seeing people engage with ideas in new ways, seeing that he has sometimes inspired critical thinking. He believes we need to use our knowledge in order to be as useful as possible to the public and students. Its good for us, its good for our students, its good for our university and its good for the province.

He also acknowledges that there are many ways to do knowledge mobilization other than through the media. The media is a familiar method for him, but others might be more comfortable using art, sound, dialogue, or video. An interesting challenge in knowledge mobilization is using evidence-informed approaches while also working within ones own skilled sets, values, capacities and available resources.

Al-Rawi in the media:

To learn more about how to strike a good balance in your knowledge mobilization work connect with the SFU Knowledge Mobilization Hub. And to learn more about engaging with the media and responding effectively to the opportunities and challenges reach out to your faculty communicators, SFU media relations, and read this LSE blog post for practical tips.

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Knowledge Mobilizers: Dispelling the power of fake news through mainstream media - SFU News - Simon Fraser University News

Facebook today said that it removed 12 million pieces of misinformation on the Covid-19 pandemic globally from its family of apps, which includes Facebook and Instagram.

The company also said that it put warning labels on over 167 million posts marked as false by third-party fact-checkers. The social media giant said that when people see warning labels, about 95% of the time they do not go on to view the original content.

In addition to this, Facebook said that in the coming weeks it would be rolling out a new campaign in India in a bid to educate and inform its users in India on ways to detect misinformation pertaining to the pandemic. The social media giant said that this endeavour will enable users to make qualified decisions about the information that they get online.

As a part of this campaign, the company will show tips and tricks to users via creative advertisements and link to a dedicated microsite, http://www.fightcovidmisinfo.com/india/ to get verified information. Facebook said that this campaign and the website will be rolled out in English and nine Indian languages, which includes Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Oriya, Malayalam, Marathi, Kannada, Gujarati and Bengali.

Lastly, Facebook said that it has also initiated a campaign in association with some of the leading doctors in the country. This campaign includes a series of 12 videos wherein doctors will address the most commonly asked questions on Covid-19. The video series titled #DoctorKiSuno will be available on https://www.facebook.com/FacebookIndia and it will cover various topics like Covid-19 in children, diabetes and Covid-19, the mental health impacts of Covid-19 among other things.

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Facebook says it removed 12 million pieces of fake news on Covid-19 globally - HT Tech

(Credit: Unsplash)

This article was exclusively written forThe European Stingby Ms, Danielle Gonalves de Assis, a medical student from So Paulo, Brazil. She is affiliated with the International Federation of Medical Students Associations (IFMSA), cordial partner of The Sting. The opinions expressed in this piece belong strictly to the writer and do not necessarily reflect IFMSAs view on the topic, nor The European Stings one.

Human beings crave for information, either to increase their social-cultural repertoire or, simply, out of pure curiosity. The problem with the information on the technological era is that even if the news is false, it still can circulate and reach people all over the world. In the coronavirus pandemic this situation can generate even more damage, any information that preaches disbelief in science in such a delicate moment has the power to become a dangerous weapon. In 2020, society and, especially, the scientific community were cover by a countless number of information, whether in scientific articles, reports or discoveries about the new coronavirus, despite this, fake news were also widely disseminated and often threatened the maintenance of disease prevention and containment in Brazil. Among some of most absurd and largely publicized in the country was that the vaccine against covid-19 would be able to alter human DNA- something that obviously has no scientific basis- or even that there would be a microchip that would be implanted in the vaccinees.

It is evident that headlines like this aim to discourage the mass vaccination of the population, however, any vaccination is a collective act aimed at protecting yourself, but mainly protecting others around you. Covid-19 still is in circulation, so, the more people are vaccinated, more lives will be spared, therefore, any fallacious news about the vaccine go beyond any political, religious or personal excuse and simply can be defined as pure ignorance. Although, for some it is easy to identify that these news are fake, it is necessary to know that 70% of Brazilians with internet have already believed in a fake news about coronavirus and that with the advent of social networks people hardly check the source of the news they just read, because they think that if it is on the internet, it must be true.

Often, these misleading headlines are disseminated in social media and Whatsapp is the leader when it comes to spreading fake news, in addition, it also is the second most used social network by Brazilians in 2020. Given this tragic scenario, it is clear that no country can afford to have misleading information going around to the population, thus, even the world health organization has already shown concern with this phenomenon and created the term infodemia to designate rumors, conspiracy theories and fake news disseminated in the pandemic and that have directly contributed to the increase in cases and deaths by covid-19, Brazil also created in 2021 a sort of channel, monitored by the Ministry of health, to report and investigate the veracity(or lack of veracity) of the facts. Some platforms such as Google and Facebook have also adopted measures to combat fake news, something very important, giving that digital platforms have a very wide reach and on them the untrue content can be disseminated quickly.

References

About the author

Danielle Gonalves de Assis, 18 years old, Brazilian, lives in Ferraz de Vasconcelos, in the state of So Paulo, where she is a first year medical student at the Mogi das Cruzes University(UMC), located in the city of Mogi das Cruzes, So Paulo, Brazil. Currently, she is a junior member of a few medical leagues in her college and she ambitious to become a permanent member in the future.

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How fake news still makes it difficult to cope with coronavirus - The European Sting

At the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic, China'sglobal media influence was in full swing, using social media to discredit Western media outlets and spread propaganda, a new report finds.

As the pandemic started to spread in 2020, Beijing used its media infrastructure globally to seed positive narratives about China in national media, as well as mobilisingdisinformation, a report by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) found.

The report, based on an original survey that polled 54 journalist unions from 50 different countries and territories, foundthat China had been usingthe pandemic to boost its image in global media coverage.

"The types of things that [Beijing] ispushing, it's not just messages on China but exploiting messages on the west," one of the authors of the report, researcher Julia Berginsaid during a roundtable discussion.

She said China has used free social media platforms such as YouTube and Twitter as a "reverse tactic" to discredit Western media, like the BBC when it reportson themistreatment of Uyghur peoplein theXinjiang region.

Reuters: Thomas Peter

Twitter is banned in Chinabut many Chinese nationalistsuse the platform to entice heated discussion in support of China's detention camps in Xinjiang or use propaganda videos to switch thenarrative.

China denies they are detention camps and describes them as boarding schools.

Data from the report shows growing concerns over the use of both disinformation and misinformation as tactics, not just in China but across South and North America,with an overall 82 per centrise indisinformation reported.

Fake news arrives even more rapidly than the virus itself,"Italian journalistLuca RIgion said to the discussion panel.

Michael Keane, an academic from the Queensland University of Technology, saidthere is a "negative light"in which Chinese media is often portrayed in Western democracies such as Australia.

"At least in [Australia] we have pluralistic media but in China you don't have a pluralistic media and that's a fact," he told thepanel.

Beijing hasstepped up its news offerings, providing domestic and international content tailored for each country in "non-Anglophone languages", the report found.

The China Cables leak of highly classified documents reveals the scale of Beijing's repressive control over Xinjiang, where more than a million Uyghurs and other Muslim minority groups are detained.

"At the same time, Beijing has weaponised foreign journalist visas, forcing resident journalists out of China."

"The vacuum in coverage is increasingly being filled by state-approved content, which is sometimes offered for free, to these countries," the report read.

Many journalists and media companiesaround the world have been censored or arrested by China, including many of Hong Kong's pro-democracy activists and influencers.

Australian Cheng Lei,ahigh-profiletelevision anchor for the Chinese government's English news channel, CGTN, was detained in Beijing in 2020.

Ms Cheng was thesecond Australian to be detained in Beijing in recent years. Writer and former Chinese government employee Yang Hengjun was taken by authorities in January 2019.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokespersonHua Chunying responded to comments made in the report and defended China's media strategy, saying itdeserves a place in the international media landscape.

"In the face of lies and rumours to smear and attack China, it is only natural to make our own voices heard," Ms Hua said.

"China explained truth and facts on many important issues including COVID-19 to leave an objective and right collective narrative and memory for mankind. This is what we call a responsible attitude from a responsible country."

China's mass internment of its ethnic Uyghur population appears to be the largest imprisonment of people on the basis of religion since the Holocaust.

This report, whichbuilds on the IFJ's previous report The China Story: Reshaping the World's Media found that globally, 56 per cent of all countries surveyed reported that coverage of China in their country had become more positive overall since the COVID-19 outbreak, while only 24 per cent said coverage of China had become more negative.

China uses the lack of Western media coverage in the region to its advantage, pushing out digestible content that's available to major news organisations who don't have eyes in the region, the report suggests.

"China is using a multi-pronged approach to redraw the information landscape to benefit its own global image, " it read.

In a panicked phone call from China's far-western region of Xinjiang, this qualified nurse reveals how she has been arrested and forced to work in a factory.

In 2020, Beijing effectively shut down journalistic access to Chinathrough visa denials and freezes, partly driven by international border closures.

The shutdown createda vacuum in China coverage, where there was a high demand for stories from China, which China filled with state-sponsored content already available through content-sharing agreements, it found.

The research found that content offered to global journalists hasbecomemore tailoredwith efforts being made to translate Chinese propaganda into different languages, even those that are not widely spoken such as Italian and Serbian.

"The media is quite robust but we need to think about the vulnerability of Western media. [Their]vulnerability is economic," report researcherLouisa Lim said.

The IFJ recommends more engagement in the region, with a strategy to reach out to and create relationships with Chinese journalists inside and outside China.

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China used social media to spread misinformation to discredit Western media during pandemic, report finds - ABC News